Kids gone wild
There's a new movement out there to get children into nature
Bruce Grierson Featured in our August 2009 issue.
A huge—and I mean huge—black bear walked right past the car as I was loading my infant daughter into the back seat. It was in no particular hurry. It had emerged from the forest and was cutting through our driveway en route to the dumpster near the elementary school, where it would poke around and then hang a left back into the wild. We both watched it recede. At 300 feet it still looked pretty big. Lila was curious but not frightened: it occurred to me that living among bears—not to mention coyotes and the odd cougar—is normal for her now. And that’s a good thing, I think.
“You know why I like it here?” my wife explained to someone not long after we’d moved to this little townhouse complex, high on the flank of Vancouver’s North Shore mountains. “Because the only predators you have to worry about have four legs. And I’ll take those over the two-legged kind any day.”
In a sense the decision was made for us. We’d been priced out of the city itself. Driven into the ’burbs. But Upper Lynn Valley doesn’t really feel like the ’burbs. It feels like a subalpine redoubt, the kind of place where you hide from the law or cook up a new religion. Walk a few hundred feet from our front door and you are out of civilization. You’re in wilderness that continues for 2,000 kilometres, until the boreal forest peters out into tundra. We have a couple of preschool-aged daughters. We figured up here they could run around and climb trees and burn off steam and breathe good air. And we wouldn’t have to worry about them being greased by a taxicab or solicited by a deve in a raincoat on the way to school. It was really as simple as that.
We didn’t realize that we had become part of a global crusade, led by people with lofty philosophical aims and reams of scientific data behind them, to “reconnect children with the outdoors.” It’s not a trivial issue. If we do this right, the argument goes, kids will be happier, healthier and smarter. And if we don’t? Well, not just those kids, but the whole planet is screwed.
Willie Sutton once famously said he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is.” Kids stay indoors these days for a similar reason: because that’s where the electrical outlets are. Until recently, when moms pulled the plug after the third or fourth hour of TV and frogmarched the kids out into the sunshine, they rarely had persuasive reasons for doing so, short of vaguely moralistic ones. (“You’re wasting your life, buster!”) Now they do. It turns out that hanging out among snails and lichen, building stick-forts and floating stuff down streams, awakens the brain in a way that no artificial environment can match.
Watching too much TV is disjunctive to the way our wetware evolved. Our brains were built to process sensory input from all sides, to focus our attention in tight and then pull back for a global sense of where we are. If we deprive ourselves of that global input, we theoretically become vulnerable to an affliction the writer Richard Louv calls “Nature Deficit Disorder.” I know. It has a cheesy ring to it, like “halitosis” or “social-anxiety disorder”—terms concocted to sell mouthwash or Prozac. But Louv is a careful researcher and has no ulterior motive except maybe to sell his own book, Last Child in the Woods, which was published four years ago and won last year’s Audubon medal. So persuasive has Louv’s book been that it has launched a movement with a catchy, Bush-beating moniker: No Child Left Inside.
Last Child leans heavily on Harvard anthropologist E.O. Wilson’s “biophilia” hypothesis: that there’s a powerful, important bond between human beings and other living systems, and we sever it at our peril. But Louv is making more noise than Wilson ever did on the subject because of his impeccable timing, right at the convergence of two crises —mental and physical health problems in kids, and the dire health of the planet. The two problems are said to be related, in the following sense: the more unhealthily detached kids become from the natural world, the less they’ll feel the urge to take on the job of saving us from ourselves.
Environmental psychologists are now piling onto the scrum, and all kinds of fascinating data is emerging. For instance:
When you build real nature—rocks and trees—into school playgrounds, kids seem to behave more civilly to each other. When kids have played outside for awhile, they concentrate better in school and perform better. When a kid with attention deficit disorder has gone camping or fishing, his symptoms diminish. It’s tempting to object that—Aha—it’s just the exercise they’re getting that’s responsible for the brain boost. But that’s not true. Because, as University of Michigan researchers recently proved, a 45-minute walk in the forest increases cognitive performance, whereas a 45-minute walk through the downtown does not.
The movement is gaining a real foothold in the U.S. The National Forest Service and the National Wildlife Federation there are now humming with well-funded initiatives to return kids to nature. There are even a handful of “Forest Kindergartens”—based on the European model of Waldkindergartens or “wild kindergartens”—where four- and five-year-old kids spend all day outside, rain or shine, year-round, working co-operatively to boil up pretend soups out of leeks or berries, making toys out of what Louv calls “nature’s loose parts,” and sometimes napping on couches made of sticks and mud.
Us? Well, we’re a little behind. But the forest school drumbeat is at least audible, and ground zero for its development may be Vancouver.
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Originally published in explore magazine. Copyright © 2010 by explore. All rights reserved. Reproduction of any article, photograph, or artwork, for other than personal use, in whole or in part, without the written permission of the publisher is strictly forbidden.
